Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Before he won that fight, however, he had to beat back another, still graver, threat from Bryan and his followers on Capitol Hill. During the second half of February, panic swept through Congress in reaction to rumors of impending intervention in the world war. The spark that ignited the hysteria emanated from other negotiations that Lansing had been conducting since the beginning of the year. Recurring tensions with Germany over the submarines, combined with persistent though less threatening friction with Britain over the blockade, impelled Lansing to grasp at an expedient to solve the underlying problems finally. With Wilson’s approval, he broached the idea of what he called a modus vivendi—a scheme whereby the Germans would abandon surprise submarine attacks and the British would stop arming their merchant ships. Reporters soon got wind of the idea, and support for it grew in the press and in Congress. The British, however, bristled at the scheme, and the Germans appeared bent on using their submarines without restraint. House cabled from London to urge delay until his return: “I cannot emphasize the importance of this.” After discussion in the cabinet the next day, Wilson had Lansing announce withdrawal of the modus vivendi.12

  Many representatives and senators believed that the administration was abandoning a promising idea and risking war. Representative Jeff McLemore of Texas, a Bryanite, introduced a resolution in the House to warn citizens not to travel on armed merchant vessels, while Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, another Bryanite, demanded a vote on a resolution he had introduced earlier to forbid Americans to travel on ships of belligerent nations. In an effort to head off a confrontation, Wilson asked three leading congressional Democrats—Senator William J. Stone of Missouri, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, the majority leader; and Representative Hal Flood of Virginia, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee—to come to the White House late in the afternoon of February 21. The meeting did not go well. The president condemned the Gore and McLemore resolutions, affirmed Britain’s right to arm ships, and maintained his tough line against German submarine attacks. According to one newspaper account, Senator Stone reacted by beating his fist on a table and asking, “Mr. President, would you draw a shutter over my eyes and my intellect? You have no right to ask me to follow such a course.”13 Despite that outburst, Stone and the others agreed to try to calm fears among their colleagues.

  Their efforts did not succeed. In the House, pressure grew for a vote on the McLemore resolution, with predictions that it would pass handily. Speaker Clark and majority leader Kitchin asked for a meeting of their own with the president. On the morning on February 25, Wilson met with them, accompanied by Flood, for what came to be called the Sunrise Conference. The Speaker warned that the McLemore resolution might pass by a two- or three-to-one margin, and he or one of the others asked what would happen if a submarine attacked an armed ship with Americans aboard. “I believe we should sever diplomatic relations,” Wilson answered. Pressed further, he added that Germany would then declare war, which might lead to an earlier end to the world war. Clark objected to that remark and warned that the president could count on his support only so long as he believed the administration was not seeking war. According to one newspaper account, Wilson retorted that people had jeered and sneered at him for his efforts to keep the peace: “In God’s name, could anyone have done more than I to show a desire for peace.”14

  Meanwhile, on February 24, with assistance from Tumulty, he had sent Senator Stone a public letter in which he affirmed that he would do everything possible to stay out of the war but stuck to his hard line on the submarines. He would not accept any abridgment of American citizens’ rights: “Once accept a single abatement of right and many other humiliations would follow.” Diplomacy as well as party politics moved him to take this line. Reports from Berlin indicated that the Germans were on the verge of expanding their submarine attacks, and the president was trying to warn them off. Next, he decided to force a showdown in the House. Addressing a public letter on February 29 to the second-ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, in the absence of the chairman (who was out of town), he asked for an early vote on the McLemore resolution. It was a bold stroke—too bold for his party’s congressional leaders, who trooped to the White House to urge delay. Wilson stood his ground and tightened the screws by dispatching the most politically potent cabinet members, Burleson and McAdoo, to the Capitol. They carried with them a handwritten letter from the president asking congressmen to relieve “the present embarrassment of the Administration” by defeating the McLemore resolution: “No other course would meet the necessities of the case.”15

  These moves did the trick. The Senate acted first. That same day, March 2, Gore intensified the debate by charging that at the Sunrise Conference the president had said he wanted war. Wilson fired back by labeling such reports “too grotesquely false to deserve credence for a moment.” The next day, Senate debate degenerated into a muddle when Gore perversely struck a critical “not” from his resolution to make it state that submarine attacks “would constitute a just and sufficient cause of war.” Just 14 senators voted against tabling—in effect voting for—the resolution. Only 2 Democrats, James O’Gorman of New York and George Chamberlain of Oregon, joined 12 Republicans, nearly all of them midwesterners and westerners who opposed increased preparedness. Several Democrats who favored the resolution, including Stone and Gore himself, voted to table it. Some claimed the situation was too confused, while others said they did not want to embarrass the president. In all, 68 senators—48 Democrats, 19 Republicans, and the 1 Progressive—voted to table the Gore resolution.16

  The House disposed of the McLemore resolution in a more straightforward way. During seven hours of debate on March 7, a parade of Democrats declared that they favored the idea behind the resolution but would vote to table it because, as one said, “the question presented in this context is whether we shall stand by the President in this crisis or not.” The motion to table carried almost two to one: 276 to 142. Only 32 Democrats opposed tabling, while 181 backed the administration, including Kitchin and others close to Bryan. Also voting to table were 94 Republicans and 1 Progressive. By contrast, 104 Republicans, 5 Progressives, and the House’s lone Socialist opposed tabling. The Republican split was mainly sectional, with the number of northeasterners for tabling and the number of midwesterners against nearly equal; many of the midwesterners represented districts with substantial numbers of German Americans. This division embarrassed Republican hard-liners toward Germany, such as Lodge, who up to now had appeared to speak for their party on the issue. The Progressives’ votes were even more embarrassing to Roosevelt.17

  These votes in Congress marked a political triumph for Wilson, and everyone knew whom he had beaten. Bryan had rushed to Washington to rally his cohorts on Capitol Hill behind the resolutions, and he was particularly active, along with German American organizations, in lobbying congressmen before the House vote. Wilson closely followed the debates from the White House, but he refrained from public comment. He did talk privately about Bryan on the day of the House vote, during a late-afternoon drive with Edith and House, who had just returned from Britain. “He seems to have come to a parting of the ways with Mr. Bryan,” House wrote. “We thought that the real cause of Bryan’s displeasure was that the President is standing for a second term.”18 Bryan put a good face on what happened in the Capitol, stating that the debates showed that Congress and the people did not want war. He was whistling in the dark. The votes proved that Wilson was undisputed master of the Democratic Party, and Bryan knew it. The House votes on the army bill later in March would reaffirm the president’s primacy.

  Behind this whole business lay some tortuous, delicate diplomacy that Wilson did not believe he could disclose. The reason House had insisted so vehemently on dropping the modus vivendi was that he was on his second wartime mission to Europe and in the midst of negotiations that he thought could change the course of history. As soon as his ship docked in New York, on March 5, the c
olonel took the train to Washington, and he met with the president the next day. He carried with him a document he had drawn up two weeks earlier with Foreign Secretary Grey. Later known as the House-Grey Memorandum, the document stated, purportedly in Grey’s words, “Colonel House told me that President Wilson was ready, upon hearing from France and England that the moment was opportune, to propose that a Conference should be summoned to put an end to the war. Should the Allies accept this proposal and should Germany refuse it, the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” The memorandum also offered assurances that this conference “would secure peace on terms not unfavourable to the Allies; and that, if it failed to secure peace, the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” The “not unfavourable” peace terms included restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, and a warm-water outlet to the sea for Russia.19

  On its face, the House-Grey Memorandum encapsulated a breathtakingly bold initiative to end the war by means of mediation or intervention by the United States. It appeared to justify House’s growing reputation as a visionary strategist and adroit diplomatist. His self-styled “Great Adventure” seemed to be bearing fruit with actions that could bring untold good to the world and, as he kept telling Wilson, would make the president’s name shine brightly down through the ages. Yet as in so much involving House, the difficulty lies in figuring out what this scheme really amounted to. Did other people take the plan as seriously as House did? Most important, did he intend this memorandum to be an invitation to mediation or a pretext for intervention?20

  The colonel showed himself at his best and his worst on the mission. He spent nearly two months shuttling among the capitals of the main belligerents, London, Paris, and Berlin, but he passed the bulk of his time in London. In each city, he operated almost entirely on his own, communicating directly with Wilson by letter or by telegram in the private code the two men had devised a year earlier. He treated the American ambassadors there correctly, but he tried to involve only one of them in his contacts with foreign officials: in London, he attempted to draw in Page, who had been a friend of his in southern expatriate circles in New York and whose appointment he had helped to arrange. Page, however, had grown so ardently pro-Allied that he told House bluntly that he would have no part in his schemes. Page scorned the venture as “mere aloof moonshine.” Nor was this House’s first clash with Page. On the colonel’s mission to Europe the previous year, he had enlisted a junior diplomat in the embassy, Clifford Carver, to work behind Page’s back, and they took to referring to the ambassador in their correspondence as P.O.P.—Poor Old Page. This was an example of the antics that later prompted Daniels’s son Jonathan to say of House, “He was an intimate man even when he was cutting a throat.”21

  In his dealings with the British, the colonel began to display the skill and sensitivity as a negotiator that led some to admire him as America’s ablest diplomat. The main object of his attentions and persuasion was Grey. With this hawk-nosed, nature-loving, melancholy widower, the colonel forged a bond that resembled the one between him and Wilson. His letters to Grey and diary entries about meetings with him took on the same intimate, ingratiating tone he used with the president. The colonel also met and got on well with other British leaders, including the strongman of the cabinet and soon-to-be prime minister, David Lloyd George, and the man who would later succeed Grey as foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour. But nothing approached his closeness to Grey, without which the House-Grey Memorandum would not have come to pass. Therein lay one of the major flaws in this undertaking. As he often did with Wilson, House let his personal feelings and sense of his own importance get out of hand. In Grey’s case, he seemed to forget that he was dealing with the diplomatic leader of a foreign power—someone who had his nation’s interests to maintain and who operated under powerful constraints. House did not deceive himself about Grey’s affection for him, but he did exaggerate both the foreign secretary’s commitment to this scheme and his willingness and ability to sway others in his government.22

  Another defect in this undertaking lay in the way House represented it to the Allies and to Wilson. In both London and Paris, he stressed how his plan might facilitate American intervention. The French foreign minister, Jules-Martin Cambon, noted that House told him that if France cooperated, “inevitably America will enter the war, before the end of the year, and will align herself on the side of the Allies. … This statement from Colonel House astonished me. I had him repeat it and, after having noted it in English, I had him read it. He said to me: ‘exactly.’” To Wilson, House reported simply—in a letter, not a telegram—that he had “most interesting and satisfactory talks” with Cambon, “quite freely outlining the entire situation as it seems to me.” House also talked differently to Allied leaders and Wilson on the subject of peace terms. Just before he left on this mission, he assured the president that he would not get into issues involving territorial demands or financial indemnities. Wilson likewise instructed House to avoid such matters and stated, “The only possible guarantees … are (a) military and naval disarmament and (b) a league of nations to secure each nation against aggression and maintain the absolute freedom of the seas.” In fairness to House, it should be noted that Wilson’s only other guidance was encapsulated in these words: “You ask me for instructions as to what attitude and tone you are to take at the several capitals. I feel that you do not need any.”23

  Yet House plunged into just the matters that Wilson had instructed him, and he had pledged, to avoid. The references in the House-Grey Memorandum to Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and Russia came after extensive discussion of those and comparable subjects, including an independent Poland, a dissolved Ottoman Empire, a consideration of Italian ambitions at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the disposition of German colonies in Africa. As for the items Wilson specified, House dropped “freedom of the seas” as soon as the British predictably scorned this “German” notion, he did not raise disarmament, and he talked about a league of nations rarely and only with Grey. In his letters to Wilson, House did not tell the president much about what he was discussing and mainly touted British and sometimes French receptivity toward mediation. “A great opportunity is yours, my friend,” he exulted from Paris, “the greatest perhaps that has ever come to any man. The way out seems clear to me, and when I can lay the facts before you, I believe it will be clear to you also.”24

  The same day that he gushed to Wilson from Paris, House met again with Cambon and the French premier, Aristide Briand, to whom he sang a different tune. He assured them of American intentions to intervene either peaceably or militarily, in order to secure a peace that would favor the Allies. He also discussed Alsace-Lorraine, Turkey, and Armenia, and said he wanted Britain, France, and the United States to work together after the war. Cambon noted that House also stressed “the secrecy which he wanted to surround his statements.” His statements were so secret that he would not share them with his friend and boss, the president. Small wonder that Jonathan Daniels would also later call him “that devious son-of-a-bitch Colonel House” and “a porcelain chamber pot full of shit.”25

  What did the respective parties—Wilson and the British—make of these doings of House’s? The colonel noted, after delivering the memorandum to Wilson on March 6, “[T]he president placed his arm around my shoulders and said: ‘I cannot adequately express to you my admiration and gratitude for what you have done.’” When House showed him the memorandum, Wilson “accepted it in toto only suggesting that the word ‘probably’ be inserted in the ninth line after the word [‘would’] and before the word ‘leave[‘].”26

  A world of difference supposedly hung on that word probably, inserted in the clause “the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” Lloyd George would later claim that Grey believed this addition “completely changed the character of the proposal” and therefore did not communicate it to the
other Allies: “The world was once more sacrificed to the timidity of statesmanship.” That claim was totally wrong. The memorandum stated earlier that “the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” So Wilson’s reiteration of probably simply underlined the plain meaning of the document. Nor did Grey react to probably, and he did pass the memorandum on to at least one Ally when he gave a copy to the French ambassador. The British had no reason to be surprised by Wilson’s insertion. Their soon-to-be-famous intelligence operation, Room 40 of the Admiralty, was tapping the American embassy’s cables and had broken both the regular diplomatic codes and House and Wilson’s amateurish “private” cipher. The British therefore knew that House was representing the situation differently to them and to Wilson. This Texan was playing poker with people who could read his cards. Also, Grey did pursue the matter further later in March, when he presented the memorandum to the cabinet War Committee; it was rejected there by nearly everybody, especially Lloyd George, with only Grey himself meekly suggesting the possibility of considering the plan.27

  Wilson’s probably was significant only as a window onto his thinking about House’s scheme. It showed that he did not regard that part of the House-Grey Memorandum as a veiled promise to come into the war but, rather, as an objective description of the state of relations with Germany. Despite his words of affectionate praise for House, he did not view the memorandum in the same world-shaking light that the colonel did. Other matters—such as the conflicts on Capitol Hill over preparedness and travel on armed ships, together with flare-ups in Mexico and in the submarine crisis—would relegate House’s scheme to the back burner. Ironically, the biggest effect of the House-Grey Memorandum on Wilson may have been to enhance the colonel’s standing in his eyes as a negotiator.